I’m yet to see where Kia is doing Arsenal any favours but I’m happy to wait.
If Joelson Fernandes signs a new deal at Sporting that’s enough confirmation we’re being conned.
Let’s hope there are some " young and up and coming players" coming our way, because we shouldn’t need to sign shit back up RBs on stupid fucking four year deals to secure bloody Willian and Coutinho (neither of whom have actually signed for us yet).
If we get Willian it’ll be because we offered a three year deal when nobody else would, we could have done that without doing Kia any favours. If Willian wants a three year deal and we’re the only ones offering it, why would we need to be doing his agent any favours? And Coutinho… well, I’ve no idea what’s even happening there, so it’s hard to comment. But again, I see no real reason why we need to being doing any sort of quid pro quo with his agent to make it happen. He doesn’t seem particularly in demand and I’m don’t think he’s necessarily that desirable anyway, so it seems mad to think we needed to give a shit right back a four year deal to be in with a chance of signing this underachiever on loan for a year.
I’m not losing my kind until more details emerge, but my initial impressions here are not great imo.
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Jon Toral, Julio Pleguezuelo and Fran Merida signed under somebody else ‘jurisdiction’, surely?
Why’s he leaving?
Every scout is gonna recommend a few duds, to be fair
Are you trying to convince me that he’s bad at his job?
Covid cutbacks. Arsenal don’t know when the fans will be let back in the stadium which is a big source of income and don’t have expense to spare…
Scouts rely on stadium access, so they’ve been out of work. No one knows what scouting accreditation will look like in the future.
There’s been a shift in player recruitment too which is more contact-led at first team level. Scouting (overseas) at academy level has been on the wane for years.
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I’m starting to be swayed into believing that Francis Cagigao is a much better scout than I give him credit for. There’s clearly a far bigger set of names than I had initially believed. So hands up from me there.
I do still trust the club judgment though and think the scouting as we know it will become a thing of the past with a move towards analytics based models and then maybe it’ll just be a case of clubs reviewing tapes and stuff in future as opposed to extensive stadium based scouting.
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There are very few unknown gems in the game nowadays. The idea of players being ‘discovered’ is nonsense.
If you’re showing promise at 12, there will be a YT video.
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I also love how if you watched half of that youtube video without the sound in 2015 it counts as a 5 year scouting project on the target.
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This tweet could easily go in the Arsenal finance thread but seeing as the chat in here is centred on our scouts.
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what an uncanny coincidence. Apparently we don’t need scouts anyway, you just google players so ez money I guess.
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I’m curious about the structures in place to replace the scouts, who will talent ID be done by moving forward and who will be overseeing the changes
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Those scouts in Belgium and Italy have been a waste anyway.
I’m betting that all these scouts are part of the 55 losing their jobs.
Most of the emerging talents in world football are signed up to sports agencies and/or individual agents from a really young age.
We will hardly ever identify a player that isn’t already attached to an agent, basically. If we’re sacking scouts and instead relying on Raul’s contact book, then it doesn’t necessarily mean we are going to miss out on loads of players.
So long as football people are still judging the players who are brought to our attention, then I don’t foresee there being a huge drop-off in our ability to bring in quality players. Getting cosy with the big agents means we’ll get quicker access to the talent on their books.
However, the real trouble arises when the agents we’re using gain too much influence on our transfer policy and we start buying random players. Soares is the one that I really struggle to get my head around.
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I bet some of the scouts will be re-hired in future.
Going forward though, there many companies like Stat DNA that provide metrics on players. These seem to be the future of scouting.
The Tifo & Zonal Marking podcasts looked into this a while back. It’s actually widely used across the world now, even in smaller leagues.
Going to games and watching players may be a thing of the past. But it will never die out as sometimes the eye for a good player can be worth more than metrics can provide.
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Yeah scouts not being able to actually scout… that is good point which I probably didn’t factor in sufficiently (there is tons of video to watch)…
I thought this is what scouts did basically? They combine statistical data and their ability to evaluate to form professional opinions on players.
Companies like StatDNA provide broad lists of relevant targets and a human scouts refine the search. Isn’t that how it works?
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